Preventing and Managing Diabetes: "It's Not Easy But It's Worth It"

“It’s not easy but it’s worth it,” is the very important message from the National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP), a partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The Partnership is promoting that message and a very useful library of resources in observance of National Diabetes Awareness Month in November. The critical need to get people to manage or prevent diabetes grows each year. Currently, 26 million Americans have diabetes and 79 million are at risk of developing the disease.

The NDEP resource library has numerous entry points including age, diabetes status and ethnicity, which link site users to targeted materials that address their specific needs and concerns. It also has entry points for community health workers, community organizations and teachers with resources such as a variety of toolkits for diabetes outreach.

Recommendations on the site help make managing or preventing diabetes more manageable for many people:

Think about what is important to you and your health.

What changes are you willing and able to make?

Decide what steps will help you reach your health goals.

Choose one goal to work on first. Start this week. Pick one change you can start to make immediately.

Don't give up. It's common to run into some problems along the way. If things don’t go as planned, think about other ways to reach your goal.